What's the difference between Junior & Senior developers?

Devpost CTO Matt Gerrior joins us to discuss the differences between Junior and Senior developers.

Experience

First, years of experience is just a number. It's not how many years you've been programming that matters. It's what you've accomplished during that time.

Junior developers

Junior developers are at the start of their career, so they should be kind of 'selfish' and focus on learning as much as possible. They need to understand the core product, how it works, why it was designed a particular way, and the tools used to build it. That way they can start contributing to the team and building their toolboxes. Open ears, open eyes.

Senior developers

Senior engineers demonstrate ownership and put their team first. They proactively try to prevent issues, support issues when they arise (yay on-call hours), and think about how to avoid them in the future.

Additionally, senior engineers tend to be analytical - thinking about why a feature needs to be built before diving into implementation. As Matt says, the best code is the code never written.

And even without managerial responsibilities, senior engineers have to spread the leadership love and be pragmatic.